He rankled at the you. “What about Dee? Are you miseducated?”
“I was, indeed.”
“Not now?”
“No.”
“You can walk through that wall?”
A smile, utter confidence. “Easy.”
“Do it, please?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You'll find out in a few hours. It's not time for you to know.”
“Dee,” he said. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
Instead of answering, she did a strange thing. She reached toward him, her hand open, passed it slowly from left to right in front of his face, looked into his eyes. “After this hour,” she said, “you will never see me again in your life on Earth. We met, no coincidence, because it's important for you to know: What's suggestion got to do with destiny? The answer will change everything you believe and everything you see.”
If there was anything she could have said to strike him dumb, that was it.
“She was right!” she said next minute, bright and happy, so disconnected a note it ran him off his tracks.
“Who was right?”
“The waitress! This is wonderful salad!”
“It is. A truly remarkable salad.” He forgot his questions about coincidence, destiny, walking through walls, reminding anybody about anything.
She pulled a notebook from her pocket, read him The Truckers Code, copied from the sun visor of that Kenworth eighteen-wheeler, her ride from North Platte:
You are the fabric that holds America together, and you are a child's best friend.
It is the trucker who delivers the farmer's crops to the grocer so children don't go hungry.
It is the trucker who carries the fuel that keeps them warm.
It is the trucker who hauls the lumber to the carpenter to build the homes that keep them safe and secure.
And it is the trucker's sacrifice of loneliness, by enduring empty nights and lonely miles, that ties America together, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
She looked up from the notebook. “Isn't that beautiful?”
The two of them talked about that, in the restaurant in Ponca City, Oklahoma, how true the words and how much we owe the ones who choose difficult dangerous work to make our lives what they are.
Dinner was over. She wished him happy flying, then Dee Hallock said good-bye, left the table, and was gone.
In his room that evening, he set his travel computer on the hotel Internet, searched her name. There were several Gwendolyn Hallocks, of course, but only one brief mention, the one he was looking for, a fragment in some genealogy site:
Samuel Black (1948–1988), stage hypnotist; m. Gwendolyn Hallock (1951–2006); daughter Jennifer (b. 1970).
The Internet gets numbers wrong all the time, it mangles quotes, it credits words to people who never said them, its facts are often fiction.
Once in a while, however, the Web manages to get it right. If that was so, Dee Hallock, with whom Jamie Forbes had just finished a fine salad, had died two years before they met.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It wasn't much of a sleep, that night.
That's why she could walk through the wall, he thought, thrashing sheets aside: she no longer accepts suggestions that she's mortal. If it weren't for miseducation, you could walk through that wall.
Is that all dying is, he thought, a dramatic change in what we believe is true about ourselves? And why do we have to die to make the change?
Because we've conditioned ourselves to believe we have to, he thought. We've married the deep suggestions of spacetime, till death do us part.
Connections like meteors: Why shouldn't we have to die to wake up? What suggestions do we hear otherwise? Nobody snaps their fingers hey! we can leave spacetime whenever we want, go home when we want, come back when we want, a little vacation to get some perspective. Nobody snaps hey! we don't have to be dragged screaming out of this world by our beliefs of accident and sickness and age.
Nobody tells us dying's a custom, not a law.
He sat bolt upright in bed, two a.m.
That's what Sam Black discovered.
That's the dimension he wrote about in his journal, a dimension of different suggestions.
It felt like a psychic waterfall, a cascade of revelation, puzzles fitting together by themselves, the monkey watching.
That's how the man left his body in excellent health. Sam Black the hypnotist used his training to dehypnotize himself from Conditioned Awareness, from the billions of suggestions he'd accepted, that all mortals have accepted, that we're trapped in bodies, trapped in gravity, trapped in atoms, trapped in cultures, trapped in Earth-minds so long as we play the game.
The whole sport called space-and-time, he realized, it's hypnosis! Suggestions, they're not true until we give our consent, until we accept. Suggestions that tie us are nothing but offers, proposals, until we accept and hammer them into chains, custom-made, for ourselves.
We players, we were all sitting in row A, every one of us volunteers eager for the stage.
What's in front of the audience? What's on the stage?
Nothing!
What's in front of the audience is the play of suggestions become belief become visible, ideas become stone to believers.
When it was him in that dungeon so long ago at the Lafayette Hotel, what he saw, what he battered against around him was as real as this world: tight-packed granite, cement and mortar way thick. He saw it, touched it, felt it. Hit it hard and it hurt his hand.
Yet Blacksmyth the Great walked through that wall as though it were air.
The subject believed it was rock, knew it was rock, impenetrable. The hypnotist knew it was air, nothing there to penetrate but the invisible private conviction of somebody hallucinating prison.
In the dark of Oklahoma midnight, he pressed the switch on the bedstand lamp, squinted against its light, grabbed the hotel pencil and jabbed words on the notepad.
Same as that prison, he thought, is my belief this moment, that I'm tight-packed in a body of flesh, in a motel room, sheetrock walls, keyed entry.
I never questioned my own beliefs! Long ago convinced myself and never asked again: must have air to breathe, shelter food water, see with eyes to know, hear with ears, touch with fingers. I'll see it when I believe it. No belief, no appearance.
But listen: not some simple change-my-mind-andit'll-go-away belief, but deep every-second-of-a-lifetime convinced this game's the only truth there is.
We don't need our belief in limits to live, he wrote, we need 'em to play the game!
Can't play hockey without ice and stick, can't play chess without board and pieces, can't play soccer without field and goal, can't live on Earth without believing we're infinitely more limited than we are.
The pencil stopped. She's right! It's hypnotism, a hundred trillion suggestions accepted, when maybe eight would have done the trick.
So what?
Out in the night, faint, a siren. Someone's playing a fateful move, this dark moment.
So what? he thought.
So I don't need to get solemn, I don't need to get scared over this or that, no matter how many people believe it.
Scared over what?
Poverty, loneliness, illness, war, accident, death. They're terrorists, every one of them. And every one of them powerless the instant we choose to be unafraid.
Lamp out, head on pillow, 'round the track again.
If it weren't for the time I served in Blacksmyth's prison, he thought, this would all sound mad: a world made out of suggestions accepted, nothing's real but thinking makes it so.
Hey . . . don't assume belief's some limp-wristed half-heart. Belief has ferocious power, it's the steel vise of the game, clamps us to it every second till we die.
We die from our beliefs, he thought, every minute someone's dead of terminal illusion.
The only difference between the reality of Blacksmyth's prison and the reality of the walls arou
nd me now, he thought, is that the prison would have dissolved overnight without my dedicated reinforcement, believing. The room will take longer than that. The prison needed my personal consent to exist, this room is built from the consent of every person in spacetime: Walls hold things in.
Eyes closed against the dark. There is no world out there, it is every bit of it in here, he thought, suggestions become beliefs become perceptions become every socalled solid thing in our playground.
Jamie Forbes went to sleep with that.
Woke five minutes later, an attack of reason. Are you crazy, man? Thinking this stuff, the world's not really here, there's nothing out there but your imagination? Are you so susceptible to suggestion that the minute some lady comes along and says nothing's real you swallow it all one gulp?
Went back to sleep, glad that he kept his sanity.
Woke ten seconds later, what about relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory? If you think Suggestion's crazy, what about Science?
There's not just four dimensions here in spacetime, folks, because you see there's really eleven dimensions, but of course seven of them are wrapped up in little tiny balls so we don't see those. But honest, they're there!
There's holes in empty space where the gravity's so strong not even light gets out.
There's an indefinite number of alternate universes existing side by side, don't you know, a universe with every possible outcome of every possible difference that anybody could ever make in this one . . . universes with no Second World War, universes with a Third World War that we don't know, and a Fourth and a Fifth, universes with people exactly like we are, except in about a billion of them you're called Mark instead of Jamie and you have brown eyes instead of blue.
Back to sleep again. How does it work?
Five minutes later, annoyed at himself. This is not differential calculus and me some mathophobe, he thought; this is drop-dead simple. How do we see what we see? How does a painter see the picture he paints? Here's how:
Painter look at canvas.
Dip brush into paint.
Drag wet brush on canvas.
Painter look at canvas.
Dip brush into paint.
Drag wet brush on canvas.
Painter look at canvas.
One stroke at time. Every day of our lives.
That's how it works.
Here's your paint bucket, Jamie, swirling with suggestions. Here's your brush, dip from the bucket what you'll accept for true. Here's your canvas: we call it a lifetime.
Now you try painting a picture, OK?
You need explanations how that works, he thought, you've got to go back long before school.
I'm hypnotized, he thought. I know how that feels, myself, personal experience, nobody has to explain. Accept suggestions and they're real, every stroke. Thirty years ago, and still I remember. There was no way I could have pounded through Blacksmyth's wall, on stage, and the wall didn't exist. I only thought it did.
Some Christian zealots on holy days, he knew, there's blood on their palms from miracle nail-wounds like Jesus’ imagined in old paintings. Next Zealots Convention are you going to tell them that's not blood that's belief? Give your presentation: we've just discovered that when folks got nailed to crosses in those happy olden days they weren't nailed through the palms but through the wrists so why are you bleeding from your palms?
Answer? “Because we thought it was palms.”
Are you going to tell somebody's got some illness she's dying from, tell her that's no illness that's your belief?
The thoughtful victim will say yes it's my belief and it's my belief for my own I think are pretty good reasons thank you and I intend to die from my belief, do you mind, or do you insist that I die from some different belief that you'd prefer, or at some other time that fits your schedule instead of mine?
Books with photographs for evidence—subjects hypnotized, convinced their legs are tightly bound with ropes. Minute later, day later, there's the imprint of ropes on their skin. Touched with an ice cube and told it's a hot iron, there's the blister raised at the spot. Not ropes, not irons . . . amazing powers of mind.
Not miracles, he thought, hypnosis. And not even hypnosis, that Greek mystification, but plain everyday have-a-donut?-yes-or-no suggestion, several hundred thousands of billions of times over and most answers yes. It'd be astonishing if we didn't see what we've been told is so!
Isn't it possible, he wondered, that this whole quantum-electric universe they say's made of tiny little strings, those strings might be created by thought instead of chance, atoms arranged by suggestion? And us unquestioning, lapping it up, amplifying all the joy and terror of our cultures’ believings because we learn best when we're emotionally involved in the lesson we've chosen to learn and believing's the way we get there?
That's not impossible, not at all. We don't live many lifetimes, he thought, but we're free to believe we do, breath-by-breath excruciating detail. A belief in reincarnation's exactly that: a belief we experience so long as we find it interesting, useful, engaging. Disengage and the games are over.
So if suggestions build the stuff we see around us, and for all the gazillions of 'em, what really is a suggestion?
He puzzled that one out in the dark, fell asleep tumbling down thought-stairs.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jamie Forbes woke to the motel alarm clock, dreams unremembered. Packed his bag, checked the room one last time before out the door, found a note on the stand by the bed, his own handwriting, forgotten, barely legible:
Sxggxstion = axy Contxct mxkeS us chXnge oxx Pxrceptxxns!
That's what a suggestion is, all right—whatever makes us change the way we think, and therefore what we notice. Suggestion's the flickering of some future which we can make true.
By the time he reached the airplane, he knew some contacts made him change his perceptions:
photos, paintings, movies, computers, schools, television, books, billboards, radio, Internet, instruction manuals, meetings, phone calls, articles, questions, stories, graffiti, fairy tales, arguments, scientific papers, trade journals, menus, contracts, business cards, lectures, magazines, songs, slogans, poems, menus, warnings, games, relationships, parties, newspapers, random thoughts, advice, street signs, conversations with ourselves, with others, with animals, parties, graduation exercises, glances, school classes, emotions, chance meetings, coincidence,
and he poured that sea into the oceans he'd found before.
Every event's a contact, he thought, walking around the T-34, checking it before flying. Every one's a glitter, noon sparkles on endless ruffled waters, each milliflash a possibility.
He knelt to look over the left main landing gear, the brake line, the tire. Tire's a little worn, he thought, and realized in the daylight: that's a suggestion.
Every suggestion intensifies itself.
Tire's worn too much?
If yes: Worn too much,
Next suggestion: Don't fly. Change tire.
In order to change the tire I must find a mechanic to do the work, must locate the proper tire if it isn't in stock, stay overnight at least to change it, meet and talk with unknown number of people I wouldn't have met if it weren't for the tire, any one of whom can alter my life with a word like the hitchhiker in North Platte. My life's changing now, if I stay one day longer for the tire or three days or twenty minutes . . . new events trigger further new events, every one the result of some suggestion accepted.
Or,
If no: Tire condition normal,
Every suggestion intensifies itself.
Next suggestion: Fly on as planned.
(Trillion other suggestions in box Do something else: Ignored. No intensifying, no effect at all.)
But if the tire blows out next landing, it could mean big trouble.
Suggestion: Reconsider original suggestion.
If yes, Time passes, weather changes, sun rises higher, coincidence patterns shift.
If no: Move on.
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Next suggestion: Complete the preflight inspection.
Ignore suggestion for now.
Accept suggestion, instead, to think about this seems-insane-maybe-isn't picture:
Every suggestion of every second, he thought, every decision we make or don't make is poised on the pinpoint of the decision that's gone before; the decision before was poised on the one before; each one elected by which suggestion I-nobody-else-I decide is true for me. No one ever makes a decision for me: when I accept advice, I'm the one chose to act on it. I could have said no, a thousand different ways.
Call suggestions “hypnosis” and all of a sudden here's a label you've been looking for, here's the pattern—the puzzle fits together. Every day, everybody in the world's going deeper into their own trance, everybody's got their own story they're believing about themselves.
My story today, he thought, is Guy on a Journey: Jamie Forbes flying through a cloud of decisions which leads to different changes which lead to a different life than he would have known if the left main landing gear tire had one-sixteenth inch less rubber on the tread than it happens to have this moment.
Each incident pressed alongside the one just-past just-to-come, he thought, every one a co-incident.
Seen from above, our life's this vast field of coincidents, flowers blossoming from the decisions we've made based on suggestions we've accepted based on our belief that the appearances that surround us are true, or aren't.
The left main tire may blow out next landing; it may be good for another fifty landings, gentle ones . . . I don't need a new tire at all.
Which is what Jamie Forbes decided, that morning, kneeling by the landing gear. This tire's fine. I'll land softly. So long, different lifetimes just declined.
What's she done to me?
Never knew one airplane from another before I learned to fly. Now I do. Never noticed handwriting before I studied graphology. Now I notice. Never saw rolling cloudbursts of suggestions before Dee Hallock mentioned it's where this world comes from. I see 'em now!
Even what they call the Law of Attraction, he thought: “Whatever we hold in our thought comes true in our experience,” that's a suggestion. Every time I try it and it works, there's a suggestion. Every time I try it and it doesn't work, there's another. When I ignore it, nothing happens . . . my life doesn't change, second by second, until the instant I do something because somehow I think it's a good idea.